Search tool sifts through business data

NEW YORK - ClearForest says it has the answer for businesses struggling under information overload.

The company claims it has a technology that actually reads documents to find relationships between words, extracts relevant information and then delivers it in a simple visual format in real time.

Credit Suisse is the first company to use ClearForest's latest product, ClearEvents, software that extracts business trends and events from news wires. Credit Suisse makes its implementation of ClearEvents accessible to customers via the Web.

The Credit Suisse version is powered by a financial "rulebook," a set of instructions that tells the package's Knowledge Extraction engine what relationships it should be seeking, thereby ensuring vertical markets such as financial services or healthcare only receive information specific to that area. ClearForest officials say new rulebooks are coming, and expect those powered for business research and healthcare to be released next year.

Credit Suisse has been using the technology since July for its Italian customer base and plans to roll it out for its pan-European Web sites soon. With ClearEvents, Credit Suisse provides its customers with real-time information on acquisitions, stock splits, mergers, joint ventures and company ratings, all culled from a Reuters news feed.

"ClearForest allows us to offer a distinctive, real-time news synopsis to our clients, and helps us to deliver and enhance our value proposition in this very competitive market," says David Chinn, a Credit Suisse executive in Europe.

ClearEvents is delivered as an application service and runs on ClearForest's hosting space, maintained by Exodus. Information is delivered to Web sites using XML, so users can customize its delivery and topic areas, ClearForest's CEO Barak Pridor says.

A hyperlink on the Web site lets users access the original article to get more information. An annual subscription for ClearEvents costs between $100,000 and $500,000, depending on usage, according to the company.

Sue Feldman, a director at market research firm IDC, says she was impressed with ClearForest's product.

"It's one of the first of what we'll see as being a new breed of analysis tool," Feldman says. "There are things in text which are ignored by most basic search engines, and those tend to be the relationship of the words within a sentence or within a paragraph."

ClearForest: www.clearforest.com